Serious game as new health telematics tool for patient therapy education: Example of obesity and type 2 diabetes

Abstract

The recent introduction of the serious games technology in medical education allows dispatching the health knowledge in communities not actually still concerned by the e-learning. The medical cyber-universities are giving essentially primary knowledge to medical students and continuing education for MP's, the paramedics being only a secondary target. The patient is rarely considered as a prior customer of the medical e-learning, but the increase of the chronic diseases as those emerging from the sequence overweight-obesity- diabetes of type 2 or from contamination spread facilitated by the new transportation modalities, with complex mode of propagation depending on their contagious (social or infectious) character, pushes to conceive active e-learning tools including a bio-feedback from the patient susceptible to increase its knowledge, level of responsibility, reactivity, compliance and observance with respect to the acute or long-term therapy and prevention policy concerning its disease. The paper presents the serious game as a user-friendly tool susceptible to serve the objective of e-therapy education at home for patients suffering of long term chronic diseases. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.